In China, the police stormed the operator of a bot farm for WoW and published how professional it is.
What kind of bot farm was that? When thinking of gold farmers in WoW, one might still have the image of an internet café with some teenagers in mind. But nowadays, there is much more behind the grind. In the Chinese province of Heilongjiang, the police have now searched a bot farm and shown how it works.
The company reportedly operated 20,000 computers simultaneously with 50 employees. Each computer was said to be farming gold on 8 accounts at the same time in various MMORPGs, including WoW. So, in this one bot farm, in the worst case, 160,000 bots were “playing” WoW.
The bot farm is said to have generated about €19,000 per day, as explained by the Chinese MMORPG website 17173.com. This translates to an annual turnover of nearly 7 million euros. For comparison: The median salary in China is about €4,500 per year.
Here you can watch the trailer for World of Warcraft: Midnight:
No good end for the farm
How was the operation detected? The bots play World of Warcraft and other MMOs completely automatically and avoid real players widely. According to the report from 17173.com, the operators simply stood out due to their sheer size.
Although the developers do not reveal how, they were able to gather enough evidence and forward it to the police, so that they could stop the operation of the bot farm, even though it had probably been in business for years. Experts assume that the size of the operation was primarily what led to its downfall.
How did it end for the farm? The police not only stopped the operation but also initiated criminal proceedings against the operators. In the end, the main responsible person was arrested, facing a prison sentence of up to 10 years. Cheating did not pay off in this case.
The bot farm has since been shut down and out of action. However, the bots are far from gone from MMORPGs. The operators of Aion 2 also know this, as they now have to restructure their economy for this reason: Aion 2 has to completely change its currency because farm bots have worked too hard
